I have now been to Bletchley Park twice. In the gift shop they have a Build your own Enigma-E Kit: The Enigma machine was the German cipher machine used to encrypt their WW2 communications and systematically cracked by the Bletchley Park Codebreakers. This highly detailed replica design gives you the […]

Most of the stuff you will need to do the electronic projects I do on this site can be got by going to Amazon (I have affiliate links), I know I have mentioned the Oomlout Starter Kit for Arduino, However I fear that this is discontinued 🙁 The Oomlout Starter […]

Following on from week 1 and week 2, we will be continuing our way through Oomlout’s Arduino Guide, at this point however we hit a snag with using iCircuit. Annoyingly iCircuit is unable to deal with arrays. An array is a cunning way of holding multiple variables inside a single […]

In Week 2 we made a single LED blink using an Arduino, now about 99.9% of the time this would be overkill (the 0.1% of the time is when you are learning); actually tell a lie, There is a VERY good reason to flash a LED with a micro, but […]

Following on from Week 1 and talking about faking it with an Arduino, we will use UnoArduSim.exe and iCircuit to model the first few circuits from the Oomlout.com’s “Experimenter’s Guide for Arduino” (Full kit was available from here). Oomlout have made the ARDX-circuit-sheets available separately to their guide PDF. Circuit […]

If you want to learn Arduino programming, but don’t always have access to a box of physical hardware, there are a number of Arduino Simulators available, however one of the best ones I have found to use, is also free. UnoArduSim Arduino is a great platform, but If you’re trying […]

After the print yesterday, I wanted to know what the 100% sized eyes would look like. Having also thought a bit more; I can think of a better way of constructing the head, so that is back to CAD for a re-design. The 100% eyes seem to have printed only […]

A while back, I went on a Geek Walk to Bletchley Park, This time Tamarisk’s Uni Computing Society went for a Social. We didn’t catch up with them, but we went as a group anyway 🙂 Last time I thought it would be cool to make an Enigma Machine, this […]

Many moons ago, before Seven Fields was built on, so I assume 1990s, My mum, Debbie McGaw took some photos of the area showing what it looked like at the time. These photos were for many years on show at Emmanuel URC Haydon Wick in Swindon. At some point the […]

In traditional fashion, A challenge I am likely to fail… however anything that risks me reading more books than normal… So lets try Linz’s The Bookworm’s 2019 reading challenge, this 60 book challenge can be done in parallel with attempt ¿Four? of the 100+ Reading Challenge. Level 1: Book of […]

A while ago I picked up these buttons for my Dr Who’s K-9 robot from AliExpress, Hobby Components have similar available online, The ones I purchased are SPDT with a 24 V DC incandescent bulb in them, regardless of the button colour they are all illuminated with a white incandescent […]

As in my Q-Blade Post 1. I made reference to both HAWT (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine) and VAWT (Vertical Axis Wind Turbines), A standard VAWT design has been covered by the Ultimaker Blog: There are several other designs that are more novel. One of these novel approaches is the O-Wind, […]

After my previous attempts at cadding up air foils, that can be found here and here for #Makevember, I came across QBlade; According to Wikipedia: QBlade is an open source wind turbine calculation software, distributed under the GNU General Public License. The software is seamlessly integrated into XFOIL, an airfoil […]

I have been back in Fusion 360 designing parts for my wind turbine: These are parts of the hub, they are the bearings 3D printed to be the size of F 6902-2RS (15x28x7 mm) bearings that are commercially available, the printer settings have been edited slightly, so I still have […]

Another boat: I was trying to dial in a 3D printer, the blobs on the hull seem to be caused by buffer under-runs from the Raspberry Pi. In the last Makevember post, there were some strange shaped Duplo links, here they are in use:

Libvirt has finaly been fixed to work on OS X, LibVirt Manager is what I use to manage the Virtual machines on Sandraudiga. libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization […]

I have been a bit lax on my Makevember posts; these were just quick prints I lobbed on the 3D Printer: bathtub boat (visual benchy) Duplo train joint The Duplo Train Joints are for MiniBoyGeek, the other part will appear once I have printed the rest of it.

I missed a Makevember post yesterday, and the one for today is going to be quite virtual again… Last time I did a post on K-9’s Back it was to work out how to read the buttons, and to do a first draft of the CADing up for the 3D […]

Following on from my Makevember post yesterday, where I tried to make turbine blades, and Failed… I fed 6050 from SG6050 into Fusion 360 and this is what it gave me: SG6050 profile To check it wasnt it that was broken, I ran the script with the defult value of […]

Following on from my previous Makevember posts… This is another virtual post, I built the Wind Turbine Hub as designed by Daniel Davis, one of the changes I would like to make, is the methord of making the blades. It looks like Daniel has a background in Mechanical Engineering, and […]

In the UK there is a monthly free PDF magazine called Hackspace. Back in Issue 4 they featured a Project by Archie Roques where he made an IoT Kettle… Here is the Pages from the magazine: The relay board chosen for switching the mains in this project is the ‘Spark […]

Today’s Makevember There seems to be very little consensus on the arangement of the colours of the buttons on the back of K-9, K9 has a 4 x 3 array of buttons on his back, I am using this image Binary kitten got me from the k9 at the Doctor […]

As part of my Weather Station Project, I want to be able to deploy it anywhere, including places with ZERO electrical power. I found this Wind Turbine on ThingiVerse, however it is released under a Attribution, Non Commercial, NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence by 3dprintable, which means I can’t edit […]

I came accross Makevember randomly from This blog. The 2018 Manifesto: Every day in November make a thing – if you can’t do it every day then do what you can. Push yourself to make daily, with less procrastination and quickly. Limit your time, always share the results. Be kind […]

Every so often I try to bin WordPress, and move away from it. I have most recently tried to use DokuWiki to try and get away from WordPress, this can still be seen on labbook.skippy.org.uk, where the some of my notes are now going to live. Things I don’t like […]